"...Also just released is a new 'tour cassette'/download ....100 copies, yellow/blue split-colour C30 cassette, hand-numbered with two alternate inner sleeves (odd & even)...."

Will 8-tracks soon make a return?

Any suggestions as to what I should hang on to "just in case".

I gave away, about three years back, my red/black Ray Bans I bought in 1987. I keep all my old spectacles, which have come back into phases of fashion: the Buddy Holly ones; the Lovin Spoonful/Lennon ones; the Malcolm X/Col Sanders browline ones.

I no longer have any flared jeans anywhere in the house. My scarves now sell for ten times the price I paid for them.

I couldn't even give the VHS tapes to charity shops, so they were picked over by friends or sent to land fill.

I still use a filofax, and buy new inserts each year (eventually). I use a Rolodex and make out new cards when couples break up or people die (quite frequently these days). I usually write with fountain pens (but have you seen the price of a bottle of ink!?)

I don't use a manual typewriter, though notice that almost every new coffee bar has one as part of its decor. If I had a Smith-Corona, I'd pawn it to buy heroin as a tribute to Warren Zevon.

If I stay exactly the way I am, will the world just roll my way? Maybe so......but C30 cassettes??!

Cassettes are great. I've got cassettes that are 40 years old that still work just fine. If you look after them and keep them in their cases, they are completely reliable (with a couple of sad exceptions - Ampex and the cheap'n'nasty ones). CD-R's on the other hand are completely unreliable.

I've still got all of my cassettes, loads of 'em. Still got some vinyl too, though not as much as I had when I was about 24, when I lost all my records (plus everything else that I owned apart from what I was wearing) in a fire.

Noooooo please.... not cassettes!! Having manufactured and duplicated them for 20 years,with all the hassle and frustrations that went along with it, I consign them to the flames of hell. Well I would but the ecological disasters of burning plastic and oxide coated tape would haunt me for the rest of my days...And thankfully it is now a much rarer thing to see roadside bushes and shrubs enveloped in ribbons of discarded tape....

I'm with Jude on this one. I've no nostalgia for cassettes, more memories of the bloody things snagging and unwinding like Brillo pads inside the cassette player. It always happened when your back was turned so by the time you noticed it was way too late. The cynic in me (curmudgeon?) gets a little irritated by the idea of super-limited releases on now (virtually) defunct formats. A tad elitist, musically snobby and pretentious, n'est ce pas? Also the thought of being forced to (re)purchase yet another item of technology so I can hear stuff...Aly

Many of my old "Honky Tonk" Radio London tapes stuck together and died. Cheap and nasty tapes, I'm afraid. Thanks to Adam's skills with a small screwdriver and patience, he managed to retrieve what was left of the interview Charlie did with Professor Longhair. I played it one last time to MP3 it. Copies available on request.

NormanD wrote:Thanks to Adam's skills with a small screwdriver and patience, he managed to retrieve what was left of the interview Charlie did with Professor Longhair. I played it one last time to MP3 it.

Yep mending broken tapes- untangling the ones which had spooled themselves round the insides of the case, taking the whole things to bits and splicing tape together only to find it had turned itself round and was playing backwards.. *sobs uncontrollably*